The Following User Says Thank You to JoeP517 For This Useful Post:

A few details on the 2013 HUP

First, thanks, Joe. (I see you have received zero thanks so far.)

$10 for the new Excel and Access packages is a steal. I saw the preview at the MS bootcamp on campus last fall - there are some very nice improvements. Add $14 for the backup DVD ( highly recommended since MS wants to lease the software to students and perhaps staff as long as they have a campus affiliation.)

I had difficulty downloading the software last night. (Of course I did not read the instructions. That's against the rules. ) I'll try again tonight & post the upshot.

Apparently this offer is only for those (potential) users who have access to an email account with a business/commercial domain name. I tried to get it with my comcast.net account, and it was "sorry Charlie, you don't qualify". I presume my gmail, hotmail, and other similar accounts would also be rejected.

HUP and still in limbo

The Microsoft Home-Use Program (HUP) is for people who use MS Office at work (in my case at a university) and want or need to use it at home. The program is negotiated by each organization. The email address reveals if your organization has signed up.

I am still in limbo regarding the download. The net is littered with complaints about the failure of MS's new method of downloading Office in its many versions over the lat year or two. The download starts with a small client with your product key as a part of the file name. It then creates a new Office15 directory which includes an executable called Integrated Office.exe. This apparently then is responsible for the remainder of the download. I have experienced failure at several steps along this path. MS gives the system requirements here ( http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/l.../ee624351.aspx ). They include a puzzling requirement for video resolution of 1024 X 576. NOT 1024 X 576 or better.

The telephone number for support is only good during weekday business hours. Clearly MS has screwed up bigtime.

Interestingly Wikipedia has never heard of 1024 x 576 - perhaps it is a MS typo for 1024 x 768?
And almost all monitors or laptops would have a better resolution than that (ignoring netbooks, as one should).

BATcherPrimary school is much better than the adult world - you get to do a lot more colouring in.

Today it decided to be cooperative

MS's instructions say to save the small executable to the desktop. It is 762 KB and the file name begins Setup.x64.en-US_ProPlusRetail...then your product key and the file type, .exe. I cranked up the machine this morning, disabled windows firewall and ran the client as Administrator.

This time it worked, but was very slow. Twice I got an error message saying I should check that my Internet connection was still up. I just left it alone. More than 8 hours later it finally finished. (I really appreciate leaving the firewall down all that time.) MS calls this new method "Click-to-Run."

There was no option to save the code to DVD. I'm glad I ordered the optional DVD for $13 or $14 extra. The install did not wipe out Office 2010, so now I have both. Will they play nice with each other? We shall see.

My wife qualified for the HUP Office 2013 by being a teacher. As she has used the Office suites for various school items, she thought this was a good offer for a full Office 2013 Pro suite, so she asked me to install it for her.

After a full weekend lost downloading the program (3 times without success) and 2 separate tech support representatives later (including the 2nd having to Remote Control my computer for @ 2 hours) we had it installed. At which point I was informed that her previous version of Office 2007 was now totally wiped out [not to be reinstalled]. Nothing in the written offer from her employer nor either rep mentioned this up to this point. Oh, well, I proceeded to run the program.

BIG Mistake. First thing I noticed is after Word, Excel and Powerpoint loaded, within 2 seconds, the screens `fuzzed' out. All text had come up crisp and clean, but then they changed to an unreadable fuzzy text. Same in all 3 programs. I IMMEDIATELY contact the tech rep and asked what gives? I can't read the screen.

His answer, no kidding, was `Oh, that's a new feature with the program. Some don't like it, so we understand Microsoft may be addressing it at some time in the future. But, that is the way it looks.' I almost went ballistic on the poor guy, but he had gotten the program downloaded and installed and it did activate [all which is what I wanted], so I gave him the benefit of the doubt. He didn't make the program.

I agreed to `try it out' and see if my wife could work with it. Well, 3 days later and not able to work in any of her Excel or Word files later, I sent an email [per the tech supports closing email instructions to me] to him asking him to either provide and update to the Office 2013 Pro suite or back it off and return our system to Office 2007 (and return her $). That was a week ago. No response from Microsoft Support to date. No improvement to the program.

I have tried multiple fonts, themes, colors, screen resolutions, and zoom settings. All the same. When you start any of the programs, or even load a new file, they come up fine - for < 2 seconds, then all fonts on the document fade to fuzz. And the whole while, all the text in the program menus are fuzzed out too. You can select a new Style from the ribbon menu and it will update the file for a second or two, then it, too, fuzzes.

If I didn't already have Astigmatism, I would have been at the eye doctors office for glasses. But I already have dealt with that for > 50 years. So that isn't my problem.

This is our experience with the new Office 2013 Pro HUP offer. Caveat Emptor!